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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist