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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up 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 in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional 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 compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist