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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting 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 redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without 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 foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel members 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