🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; 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 the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist