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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote 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 muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle 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 columnist