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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise following California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist