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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district 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 truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy 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 first critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist