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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist