🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance 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’ rhetoric could help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their respective districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, 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, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist