🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: 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 genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer