🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections 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 no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

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

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer