🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 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 upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended 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 seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist