Should Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Combat the Lone Star State's Aggressive Tactics with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, 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 power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings 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 conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist