🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 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 the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer