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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for his administration, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

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

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

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’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 next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated response to developments happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will provide Republicans an five more seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California measure seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict triggering a retaliatory cycle in which red states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on strictly principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs 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 own maps in retaliation, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say 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 steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure permanent positions 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 other critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country 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, it is believed, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what fighting it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the power to probe Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist