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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens 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 control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist