🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

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

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is created 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 democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process 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 conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer