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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states 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 feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define 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 initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer