🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek ways to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer