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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist