🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer