Ought Californians Vote to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, 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 spending and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to cause 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 after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist