🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington 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 the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer