🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional 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. Partly, it is a belated response to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering 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 necessary. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer