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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they say, 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 functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist