Ought California Voters Vote to Redraw District Lines and Fight Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Similar Measures?

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer