🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into 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 his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

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

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans 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 GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change maps that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the battle 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 authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist