Should Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Fight the Lone Star State's Aggressive Tactics with Similar Measures?

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer