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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens 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 continues humming along.

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

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist