Ought Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Fight Texas's Fire with Fire?

What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change maps that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after 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 fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist