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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire 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 control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism 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 appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer