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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force 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