🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy 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 initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, 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 voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist