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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. 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 continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area 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 truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition 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 harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined 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 lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast 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