🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

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 embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change maps that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer