Ought Californians Vote to Redistrict and Fight Texas's Fire with Fire?

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned 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 provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready 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 tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer