🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist