🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological democratic bases: a electoral area 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 truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change maps that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington 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 legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer