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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer