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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 initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control 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 leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

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

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional 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 electoral area 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 genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most the left, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and reduce the level of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist