Should Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redraw District Lines and Fight Texas's Fire with Fire?

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives 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 force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer