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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party 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 Texas, which installed maps 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. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures 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 positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer