Should Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redraw District Lines and Combat Texas's Fire with Fire?

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for ways to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer