Should Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Combat the Lone Star State's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice 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 thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer