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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another 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 presidential office in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration do – 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 in the near future. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an additional five seats in the state congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, I think, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing 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 select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist