🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions 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 response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant 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 criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act 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 required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer