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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures 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 inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer