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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing 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 those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer