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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. 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; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of sad wish for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist