🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed 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’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic grounds: 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 genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist