🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

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

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more seats 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. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist