🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic bases: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer