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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more 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. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort 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 world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. 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 made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer