🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance 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 way that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist