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

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight 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, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer