🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area 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 implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion 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 initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer