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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting 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 five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist