🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have 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 power to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

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 approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist