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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, 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 installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election 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 suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist