Ought California Voters Vote to Redraw District Lines and Fight Texas's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. 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 triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change maps that secure long-term seats for themselves: 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 objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist