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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of 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 a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad wish for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power 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 Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist