Ought California Voters Vote to Redraw District Lines and Combat the Lone Star State's Fire with Fire?

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide 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. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer