Should 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 is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, 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 procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, 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 most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is able 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. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer