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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a functioning political system 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 initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference 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 turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; 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 amount of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. 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 made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect 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 power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer