🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

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

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: 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 objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates 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 writer