🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area 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 democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer