🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate 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 situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer