🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right 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 strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the fight 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 practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist