🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s example in seeking 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 authority and look for ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; 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 lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist