🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration 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 anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state 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 likewise following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result 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 dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist