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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the measure on more purely ideological democratic bases: a district 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 implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect 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 power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer