Ought California Voters Vote to Redistrict and Fight the Lone Star State's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive 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 shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek methods to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer