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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the administration claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist 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 approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long adopted extreme biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state’s House representation next year; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also following California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and frustration to the president’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics warn that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the vote is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change boundaries that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that most the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored population groups; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, instead of the other way around; it is negative that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer