Should Californians Vote to Redraw District Lines and Combat Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist