🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

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 deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation 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 the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. 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 Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, 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 holds is subpoena power, and the power 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 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist