🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a district 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 genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most the left, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist