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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that power for himself, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

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

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may help California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to developments happening in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in Texas, which implemented maps that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have critiqued the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw maps that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the world that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, instead of the other way around; it is not good that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are take office, they will find themselves a member of a body with the power to probe the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to force members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer