🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist