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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer