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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; 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 once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the power to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel 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 columnist