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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

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

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist