Should California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Combat the Lone Star State's Fire with Fire?

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after 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 practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. 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 power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer