Should California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Fight Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for ways to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable 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. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress 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 great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer