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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large 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 led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of authority and seek ways to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: 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, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist