Ought Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Fight the Lone Star State's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds 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 House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. 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 complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer