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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines 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 California proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer