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

What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist