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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky 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 strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term 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-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most the left, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state 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 fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel members 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 writer