🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; 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 emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own maps in response, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance 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 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 Congress does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle 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