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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist