🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own districts in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’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 representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, 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 anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer