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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington 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 measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their own maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer