Ought Californians Vote to Redraw District Lines and Combat the Lone Star State's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created 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 voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their respective districts in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad 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 reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer