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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, 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 even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional 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 progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize 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 merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer