🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result 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 muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight 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, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer