🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own districts in response, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, 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 constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist