🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist