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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist