🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist