🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky right 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 his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign 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 lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist