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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 initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help 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 next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance 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 measure is explicitly designed 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 additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw maps 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 a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist