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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric 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 deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide 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 also following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is created in such a manner 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 power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent seats 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 a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is 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 fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer