🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

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

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; 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 example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area 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 genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their respective districts 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 without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to Washington 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 stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer