🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few 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 mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy 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 first critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer