🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric 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 approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not 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 debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making 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 the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist