🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Prop 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 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 occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own districts in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, 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 world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer