🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist