🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend 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 ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist