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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, 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. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. 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 controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer