Should Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redraw District Lines and Combat the Lone Star State's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on 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 redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist