Should California Voters Vote to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries 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 political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer