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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – 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 citizens notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic 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 reality that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the battle 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 power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members 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 politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel members 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