🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather 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’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw 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 second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US 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 – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist