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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years 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 seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer