🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle 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 way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure permanent positions for their party: 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, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force members 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