🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most the left, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist