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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term 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 a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer