Should Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redraw District Lines and Combat 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, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering 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 fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist