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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting 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 leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures 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 revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; 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 after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist