🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer