Should Californians Vote to Redistrict and Fight Texas's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue 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 opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer