🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, 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, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist