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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer