🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn 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 implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist