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

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. 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 humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist