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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist