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

What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate react with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist