🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party 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 belated response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic 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 representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist