🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, 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 question of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic bases: 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 representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term seats 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 critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time 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 the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist