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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

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

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an additional five 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 also following the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist