Should California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Fight the Lone Star State's Aggressive Tactics with Similar Measures?

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors 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