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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help 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 more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. 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 Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist