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

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer