Ought California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redraw District Lines and Fight Texas's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist