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

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term 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 a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer