🔗 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 tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few 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 mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer