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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more 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 belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force 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