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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

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

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required 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 reverse; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the level 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 democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer