🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may 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 embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate react with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in response, fails 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 doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic 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 reality that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, 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 the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer