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

What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better 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 circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer