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

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure 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 the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle 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, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer