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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire 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 appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle 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 proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist