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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

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

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 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 special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist