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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation 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 absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist