🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once 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 fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer