Should California Voters Vote to Redistrict and Combat the Lone Star State's Fire with Fire?

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement 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 true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most the left, I think, 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 voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer