🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed 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 House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek methods to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in response, 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 engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence 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’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington 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 utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer