🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy 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 first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer