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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to 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 the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist