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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods 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’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result 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 views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist