🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion 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 merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, 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 sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer