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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ 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 embraced 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 occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most the left, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; 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 measures have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist