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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. 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 additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy 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 argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power 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 take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel members 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