Ought Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become 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 himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist