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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to allocate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries 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 the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are take office, they will become a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer