🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate 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 mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology 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, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist