Should California Voters Vote to Redraw District Lines and Combat Texas's Fire with Fire?

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive 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 shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist