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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 tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave 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 motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. 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 made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist