🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted 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 stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different 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, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist