Ought Californians Vote to Redraw District Lines and Combat Texas's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way 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, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives 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 power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer