🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

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

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial 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 at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist