🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help the state of California’s Prop 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 upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area 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 democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer