🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer