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

What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer