🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar 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 attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer