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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much 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 mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer