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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee 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 years.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist