Ought California Voters Vote to Redistrict and Fight the Lone Star State's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

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 crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament 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 five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer