🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled 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 nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats 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. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for ways to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, 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 procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to change maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer