🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state House representation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, 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, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. 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 reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist