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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 initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate react with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist