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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

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

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer