Ought Californians Cast Their Ballots to Redistrict and Fight the Lone Star State's Aggressive Tactics with Similar Measures?

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance 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 clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist