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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure permanent 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 a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist