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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 crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, 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 anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control 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 response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also following the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. 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, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer