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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, 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 control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area 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 truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer