🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, 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 was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings 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.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer