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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has turned into 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 power for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer