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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure 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 years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad desire 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 the left, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer