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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer