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

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP 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, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist