🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

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

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed 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 California measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee 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 critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors 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