🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly 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 allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist