🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear right 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, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

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 institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer