Should Californians Vote to Redraw District Lines and Fight Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed all 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 somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state House representation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack 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 shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer