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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions 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 retaliation to change maps that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist