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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own districts in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing 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, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer