🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal 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 humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal 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 the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer