🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

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

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer