🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry 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 intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist