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

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer