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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, 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 anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer