Should Californians Vote to Redraw District Lines and Fight Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Similar Measures?

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines 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 political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer