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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner 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 influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, 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 redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish 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 most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer