🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

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

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish 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, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is sad; 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 Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist