🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring 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 ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist