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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

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

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 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 upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer