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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own maps in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated 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 other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer