🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries 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 the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer