🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency 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 majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 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 made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer