🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

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

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members 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