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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, 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 recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to say 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, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer