Should Californians Vote to Redistrict and Fight the Lone Star State's Fire with Fire?

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, 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 leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans 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 provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome 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 opposing views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad desire for a different country 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 hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. 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 the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist