Should Californians Vote to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist