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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a vital legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

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

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist