🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process 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 spur the right to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – 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 targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist