🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, 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-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more 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. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim 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 actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, I think, yearn for 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 population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect 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 Prop 50 passes and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist