🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

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

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing 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 select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer