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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 declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response 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 Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist