🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist