Ought Californians Vote to Redistrict and Fight Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, 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 members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer