🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another 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 time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, 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 control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s 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 true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer