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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. 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 U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from 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 Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist