🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological democratic bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, 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