🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 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 voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation 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 following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive 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 years.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist