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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky right of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening 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 rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help 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 more House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics 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 means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats 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, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist