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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist