🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations 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?

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful 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 choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist