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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats 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 reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely 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 argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist