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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, 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, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

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

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP 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 required no any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist