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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another Trump administration, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in recent months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, a great deal of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel legislatively approved expenditures and attempting to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring in other states: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give Republicans an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the vote is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad wish for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, it is believed, desire and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is harmful for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will find themselves a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his inner circle to testify. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer