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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal 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 not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist