🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress 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 aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer