🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize 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 first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent seats 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 second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist