Ought California Voters Vote to Redistrict and Combat the Lone Star State's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary 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 declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer