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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for ways to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions 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.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist