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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state 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 boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer