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

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party 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 installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats 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 force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer