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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver 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 attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change maps that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict 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 after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist