🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, 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 Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; 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 lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer