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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

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

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable 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 measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad desire 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 Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still 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 authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist