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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

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

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way 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 initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist