🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain 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 keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define 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 merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer