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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition 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 additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist