Should Californians Vote to Redraw District Lines and Combat the Lone Star State's Aggressive Tactics with Similar Measures?

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant 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 initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making 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 the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer