Ought California Voters Vote to Redistrict and Combat Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more 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 belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize 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 own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital 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 stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer