🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel associates 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 columnist