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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

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

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s 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 more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer