🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal 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 issue of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced 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 imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that most the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and reduce the amount of suffering 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 required. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist