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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define a functioning political system 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 critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation 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 lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and lessen the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist