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

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. 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 turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also following the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California 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 most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist