Ought California Voters Vote to Redistrict and Fight Texas's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist