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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the authority to abort legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to move the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their party is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will provide the GOP an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and seek methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: 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 means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s control and reduce the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer