🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver 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 political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist