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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. At present, the government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

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

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

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington draw their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are likewise following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a way 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 power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a kind of sad wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s control and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the authority to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel associates 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 writer