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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’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 captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument 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 valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change maps that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist