🔗 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 power to declare war, long considered a vital 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 additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be 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 appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. 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 could assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for 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 Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist