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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority 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 September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad 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 most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his actions 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 writer