🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer