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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist