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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer