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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide 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 liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer