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

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist