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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer