🔗 Share this article

What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those 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 not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence 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 confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer