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

What, exactly, 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 become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist