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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer