Ought Californians Vote to Redraw District Lines and Combat the Lone Star State's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the power to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer