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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, 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 select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer