🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance 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 rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure 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 confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist