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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide 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 the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions 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 change maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force members 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 columnist