🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split 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 clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent 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, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic 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 the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power 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 democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist