🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer