🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist