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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative 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, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

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

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, 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-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and reduce the level of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist