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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating 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 Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed 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 objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the battle 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 appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer