🔗 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 power to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power 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 more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer