Ought California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redraw District Lines and Combat the Lone Star State's Fire with Fire?

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, 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 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 shift, but a kind of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer