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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 declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist 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 Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer