Ought Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redraw District Lines and Combat the Lone Star State's Aggressive Tactics with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking 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, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist