🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist