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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, 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 still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist