What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.
The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.
And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?
How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist California’s Prop 50 prevail
And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)
The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.
It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.
The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.
If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force associates 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
Rashid Al-Mansoori is a tech journalist with over a decade of experience covering innovations and digital transformations in the Middle East.
