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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered 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 claimed additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation 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 likewise following California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist