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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

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

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 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 voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable 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 become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer