🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move 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 perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled 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 House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic 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 maps that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist