🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled 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 electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer