What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.
The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.
And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?
In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help California’s Prop 50 prevail
And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)
The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.
It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.
The other objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, 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 select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.
If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.
Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer
Elena Hartwell is a multidisciplinary artist and educator passionate about fostering creative communities in London.