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What, precisely, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective maps 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 antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer