Ought California Voters Vote to Redistrict and Combat the Lone Star State's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize 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 merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer