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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they don’t – the government simply ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many people notice. Currently, the government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the presidency continues humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who holds a majority in a body that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has seized the attention of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state measure is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in Virginia are also following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The California measure seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate react with concern and frustration to the president’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the move could have unintended consequences, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory cycle in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: 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 healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to claim that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already engaging in such behavior without those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has required no any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee permanent positions for their party: 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 critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a different nation than the one that the United States has turned into. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their constituents, rather than the other way around; it is not good that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s control and reduce the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what opposing it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in practice have legislative, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet columnist