🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design 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 drawn 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 democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist