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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era 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 the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer