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

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

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 ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s lead 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 seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference 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 become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist