🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the government has been shut down 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 dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist