🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. 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 the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist