🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer