Ought Californians Vote to Redistrict and Fight Texas's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological democratic bases: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist