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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; now, under the office of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government simply shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the question of control of Congress can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging may help California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have long adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is clearly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and look for methods to restrain his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the outcome of the vote is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the influence of opposing views is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic 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 incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have become essential in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure passes and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their investigations into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer