Ought Californians Vote to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more 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 across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves 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 lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority 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 crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer