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

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist