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What, precisely, is the role of 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 unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help California’s Prop 50 prevail

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 upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more positions 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. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer