🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. 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 September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. 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 transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist