🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist