Ought Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise 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 as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’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 attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist