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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost 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 government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

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

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective districts in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist