🔗 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 power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek ways to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution 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 not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer