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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

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

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist