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

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is created 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 genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ 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 more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition 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 select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist