🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for ways to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer