🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most the left, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist