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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant 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 merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings 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