🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist