Should Californians Vote to Redraw District Lines and Fight the Lone Star State's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement 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 true that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, 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 anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer