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

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, 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 eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist