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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum 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 occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist