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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own districts in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist