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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive 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 simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed response to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own maps in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist