🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a manner 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 power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to change maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined 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 lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force 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