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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

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

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also emulating the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own maps in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions 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 a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer