Ought California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Similar Measures?

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, 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 majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure 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 critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer