🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. 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 the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer