🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer