Ought Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redraw District Lines and Combat Texas's Fire with Fire?

What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum 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 liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most the left, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct 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.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist