Should California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Fire with Fire?

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to say 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, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind 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 world – in the world that most the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members 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 columnist