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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue 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 sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer