Ought California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Fight Texas's Fire with Fire?

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions 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 secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer