🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer