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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing 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 merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, 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 additional representatives are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist