🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear 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 power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer