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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 legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in 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 proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. 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 fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics 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 part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist