Ought Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redraw District Lines and Combat Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. 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 implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their hearings 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 conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer