🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change maps that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad wish for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer