🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer