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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations 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