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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs 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 somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: 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, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the power to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer