🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

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

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic 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 stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer