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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion 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 criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force members 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