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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels 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 budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist