🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions 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