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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

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

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may 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 more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five 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 Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’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 examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist