Ought California Voters Vote to Redistrict and Fight Texas's Fire with Fire?

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist