Should California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redraw District Lines and Combat Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must now 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 do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their respective districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer