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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist