🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats 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 emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored 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 noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist