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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – 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 reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a functioning democratic process 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 the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer