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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are under way 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 measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel 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 columnist