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

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, 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 redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for ways to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result 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 debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist