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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered 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 claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly 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 provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is capable 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. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be sent 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 politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer