🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic 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 truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle 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 reality have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer