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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 tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Proposition 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 captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; 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 California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area 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 truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something 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 lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer