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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – 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 in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. 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 passes and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer