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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government simply ceases operations. At least, large sections of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. 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 transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel 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 writer