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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the 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 control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist