🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional 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 grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense 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 in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure 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 second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist