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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force 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