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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, 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 world – in the world that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist