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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own maps in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer