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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise 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 something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist