🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also following the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist