Should Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Fight Texas's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial 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 asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on strictly ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist