Ought California Voters Vote to Redraw District Lines and Fight the Lone Star State's Aggressive Tactics 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 crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation 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, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer