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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’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 next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined 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 the right to alter their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal 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 actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer