Should California Voters Vote to Redistrict and Combat the Lone Star State's Aggressive Tactics with Similar Measures?

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the federal 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 control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that most the left, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist