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

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs 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 irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer