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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument 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 worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer