🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats 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, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer