🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’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 investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use 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 part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist