🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament 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 the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions 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