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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to change boundaries 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 objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional 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 actions and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer