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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to change maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, 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