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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer