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

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause 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 after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist