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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation next year; 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 California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that most the left, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer