Proposition 50, the measure redrawing California’s congressional lines that’s at the center of the Nov. 4 statewide special election, has been attacked by opponents as a “power grab.”
That flips the responsibility for the nation’s redistricting debacle on its head. Proposition 50 isn’t an offensive move to usurp power. It’s a defensive counter to try to protect our state from political emasculation. Californians have no other good options.
It wasn’t California that started this. It was President Trump and Texas Republican lawmakers who launched a redistricting plan to ensure GOP control of the U.S. House of Representatives. Talk about trying to steal an election!
What’s at stake in this election is any hope of a check on the Trump administration.
No pushback
We have watched this year as the president and his administration have militarized our cities, used masked officers to round up both immigrants and U.S. citizens indiscriminately on our streets and in our courts, sent people to prisons in foreign countries without a semblance of due process, and threatened to revoke the citizenship of people born here.
We have seen the administration weaponize the Justice Department to go after Trump’s perceived enemies, use regulatory agencies, federal funding and data mining to try to stifle dissent, and dismantle key parts of the national government as it unravels years of progress on climate change, undermines the credibility of our federal public health systems, and guts the foreign aid that made this country a respected world leader.
Under Trump’s direction, the U.S. has bombed vessels in international waters in defiance of international law, threatened war against a South American nation, upended the world economy with tariffs that globally isolate our nation and alienated some of our closest allies.
The pain has been felt here in California and the Bay Area as the administration splits up immigrant families, targets academic freedom at our cherished universities, unilaterally cuts off key funding for scientific research and our state and local governments, and threatens to militarize our cities.
And yet there has been no pushback in Washington. With Republican control — however slim — of the Senate and the House, where there is near-complete deference to the whims of the president, and with the enabling by the Supreme Court, Trump has broken this nation’s norms, laws and the constitutional balance of powers without questioning or oversight.
The alignment of the Supreme Court is locked in for decades to come. Republicans are almost certain to maintain control of the Senate in the 2026 election. The only check on Trump’s escalating power would be Democrats winning control of the narrowly divided House.
Which is why our elections are so important, and why Trump’s attempt to put his fingers on the electoral scale is so alarming. And that’s why Proposition 50 is so important.
The president sees the threat to his unchecked rule. That prompted him to goad Texas Republicans into redrawing their House seat boundaries — a process usually done every 10 years after the national census, not in the middle of a decade — to give the GOP five additional favorable districts.
Missouri soon followed with new maps designed to give Republicans an additional seat. North Carolina did the same this week. The red states of Kansas, Louisiana, Indiana and Florida are expected to do the same.
California’s response
Proposition 50 is Gov. Gavin Newsom’s response. But, unlike those Republican states, California doesn’t leave it to its legislators to draw political boundaries.
In 2008, voters approved an initiative that created the state’s independent redistricting commission and tasked it with drawing the district boundaries for the state Legislature and Board of Equalization.
The establishment of the commission was a wise move designed to take partisanship out of the drawing of boundaries for governmental bodies within the state. And nothing in Proposition 50 would affect that.
Contrary to claims about the measure, Proposition 50 does not dismantle the redistricting commission, nor does it affect the drawing of boundaries for state legislative districts.
Then, in 2010, voters approved another initiative expanding the commission’s responsibilities to include drawing congressional districts. It seemed like a good idea that would set an example for other states to follow.
But it hasn’t worked out that way. For the redistricting after the 2020 census, only eight states, including significantly California, Washington, New York and Michigan, used independent redistricting commissions.
Applied across the nation, the commission process has turned into unilateral political disarmament. Those states that did the right thing now find themselves vulnerable to the GOP’s systematic and partisan manipulation in other states.
Despite that, Proposition 50 would not even abandon the congressional redistricting approved by voters in 2010. Rather it suspends it temporarily to counter the unprecedented Trump-led manipulation by redrawing the state’s congressional lines to increase the number of blue seats. California would return congressional redistricting to the independent commission after the 2030 census.
In fact, that might be the one mistake of Proposition 50 — that it doesn’t go far enough. There’s little to no hope that red states are going to lay down their political arms before the next decennial line-drawing. If we’ve learned anything from this experience, it’s that California shouldn’t either. But there will be time before then to revisit the issue.
In the meantime, California must protect its interests — it must defend to the extent possible against the Trump assault on norms of national redistricting. That is the only hope for returning some semblance of congressional oversight and the constitutionally mandated balance of powers to Washington.
That’s why I voted for Proposition 50.
Reach Editorial Page Editor Daniel Borenstein at dborenstein@bayareanewsgroup.com.