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

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist