🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’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 attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist