🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted 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 as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s 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 revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic 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 much we have fallen from a state 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 mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force members of his inner circle 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