Should California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redraw District Lines and Fight the Lone Star State's Fire with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority 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 more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer