🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing 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 substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most the left, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist