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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; now, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has also defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

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

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

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, New York and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has led to narrowly split control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of power and look for ways to check his worst tendencies. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of opposing views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it is illogical to claim that Republicans will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw maps that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the complete lack of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country 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, it is believed, desire and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian creep of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s additional five blue representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and the state’s additional Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer