What, exactly, is Congress for? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.
The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress, too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, that is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.
And so the question of control of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?
And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled states such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give Republicans 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 Virginia are also following California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)
The California measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.
It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation or revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.
The second critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.
If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
