🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system 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 argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer