Should California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redraw District Lines and Fight the Lone Star State's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult 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 asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for ways to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle 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 more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer