🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most the left, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched 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 stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist