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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, 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 passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist