🔗 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, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. 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 does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer