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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power 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 member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer