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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky 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 his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, anyway; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who has a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, military or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s additional representatives are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist