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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body 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, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

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 Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish 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 the left, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer