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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, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

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

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer