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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, 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 merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: 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, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist