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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s 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 lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something 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 transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist