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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters 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 in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled 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 control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for ways to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, 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 eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most the left, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist