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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for ways to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist