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

What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist