Should Californians Vote to Redistrict and Fight the Lone Star State's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise following California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer