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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions 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 progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, 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 was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer