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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more 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 the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer