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

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party 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: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer