🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional 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 too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

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

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide Republicans 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 Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required 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 made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist