🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may 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 liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist