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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for ways to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after 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 fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer