🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also following the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek ways to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, 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 authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer