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

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist