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

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned 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 deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for ways to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still 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 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer