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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist