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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire 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 Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes 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 California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state 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 lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer