🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in retaliation, fails 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 engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, 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 continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist