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

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds 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 provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for ways to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer