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

What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee 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 a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer