Should Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redraw District Lines and Fight Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, 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 distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer