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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by the electorate in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some critics caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological pro-democracy grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a causal point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw maps that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more significant, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the power to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist