🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer