🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

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

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing 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 initial critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their own maps in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication 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 Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist