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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer