🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address 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 true that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds 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 the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer