🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district 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 genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds 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 the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist