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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; virtually all legislation must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the attention of liberals nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an five more positions in the state House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also emulating California’s lead in seeking to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as progressive voters react with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer