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

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. 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 willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer