Ought California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer