🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made 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 motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. 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 probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist