🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create 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 Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct 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 Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer