Should California Voters Vote to Redraw District Lines and Fight Texas's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned 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 provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of 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 manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer