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

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. 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 budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. 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 is approved and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist