🔗 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 initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also following the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, 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 deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer