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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years 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 authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, 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 shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not 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 deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist