Ought California Voters Vote to Redraw District Lines and Combat the Lone Star State's Aggressive Tactics with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited 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 own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist