🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist