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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly intended as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their respective maps in response, fails 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, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic 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 turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist