Ought California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Fight the Lone Star State's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process 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 alter their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’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 examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer