🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five 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 investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate 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 something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer