Should California Voters Cast Their Ballots to Redraw District Lines and Fight Texas's Aggressive Tactics with Fire?

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle 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