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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure 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 televise their hearings into his actions and to compel members 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