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

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely 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 ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way 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 opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to 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 significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist