Should Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redraw District Lines and Combat Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Similar Measures?

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has 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 more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital 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 time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist