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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel members 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