🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist