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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind 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 the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer