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

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable 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 not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer