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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist