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

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic 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 time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer