🔗 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, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain 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 executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate 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?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they say, 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 deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement 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 accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist