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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another 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; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created 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, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that secure long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer