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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, 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 little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological democratic bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior 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 seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that most Democrats, I think, 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 targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’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 ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force 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