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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second 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 years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. 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 care who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior 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 themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist