🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 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 voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry 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 state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel 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