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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also following the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so without those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist