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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for methods to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area 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 democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs 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 response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical 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 world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct 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