🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, 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-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, 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 valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist