🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, 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 legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer