🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down 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 issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries 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 liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer