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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion 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 worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: 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 other critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable 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 noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. 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 Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing 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 authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer