🔗 Share this article

What, precisely, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, 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, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the government has been shut down all 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 be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist