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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics 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 additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel members 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