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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, 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 appears to be mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating the state’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area 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 truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to alter their own districts in retaliation, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to force associates 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 columnist