Ought California Voters Vote to Redistrict and Fight 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 authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer