🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations 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.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer