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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to move 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 essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries 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 captured the attention of progressives across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their party is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But Prop 50 is not without controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their own maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better world – in the reality that most Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, 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 Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist