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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled 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 truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen 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 practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. 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 the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist