What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.
The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.
And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?
How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help California’s Prop 50 succeed
And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)
The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.
It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.
The second objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.
If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.
Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer
