🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five positions 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. (The left in Virginia are also following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens 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 respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term 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 other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish 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 Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer