🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist