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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave 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 retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and lessen the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist