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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government 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 member of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer