🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed 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 dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional 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 liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy 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 critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause 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 the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer