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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, 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 little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Prop 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 captured the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel 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 columnist