Should Californians Vote to Redistrict and Fight the Lone Star State's Fire with Fire?

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring 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 impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic 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 not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for 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 harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist