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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer