🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens 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 districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist