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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer