🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly principled 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 argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer