🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

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

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist