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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind 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 Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist