🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all 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 seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics 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 representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist