🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents 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 additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer