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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

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

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade 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 House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist