🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs 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, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist