🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

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

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer