🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to check 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 triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer