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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down 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 question of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district 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 democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer