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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 legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. 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 could assist 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 liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing 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 tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist