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What, exactly, 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 congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge perennial essential 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, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, 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 sad desire for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members 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