Should California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Fight Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide 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. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not 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 Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer