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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

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

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist