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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic 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 truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own maps in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives 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 era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist