Should California Voters Vote to Redistrict and Fight Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state House representation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled 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 not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing 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 tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist