Ought California Voters Vote to Redraw District Lines and Combat Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. 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 Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer