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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, 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 as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can appear rather irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad wish for a different country than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better world – in the world that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and reduce the level of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. Only once the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to probe the president, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer