Should California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redraw District Lines and Combat the Lone Star State's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist