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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist