🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

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

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist