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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready 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 tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer