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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist