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

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. 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 humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps 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 measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true 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 values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer