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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved 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 developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election 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 debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. 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 fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer