🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist