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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation 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 attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer