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

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, 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 federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also following the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, 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 better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, 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 autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast 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 something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer