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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in 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 California proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly 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 democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer