Should Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Fire with Fire?

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office 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 White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer