Ought Californians Vote to Redistrict and Combat the Lone Star State's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control 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 Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State 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 sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that secure permanent 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 second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament 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 representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer