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

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their own maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions 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, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer