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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 tell. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on more purely principled democratic bases: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their own districts in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer