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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative 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, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced 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 long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek ways to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely 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 define 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 merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer