🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist