🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose 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 turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions 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 change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer