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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats 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 concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer