Should California Voters Vote to Redraw District Lines and Combat the Lone Star State's Fire with Fire?

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations 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 columnist