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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a murky right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress as well; now, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, anyway; virtually all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, 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 longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to check his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of retaliation to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions 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 second objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and reduce the level of suffering he is able to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. 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 fails to in reality have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct 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