🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, 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’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most the left, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist