🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. 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 distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist