Should California Voters Vote to Redistrict and Fight Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party 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 reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: 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 truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: 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, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force members 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 columnist