🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw 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 second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist