🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

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

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer