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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 determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored 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 essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force members 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