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

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress too; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort legislatively approved spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, large sections of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on humming along.

And so the issue of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by the electorate in a special election next month, has seized the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a belated response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to narrowly split House control 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 response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries 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. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state initiative seems likely to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and seek ways to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some critics caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the measure on more purely ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth considering each of these objections on their own terms. The initial critique, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, fails as a causal point: it does not make sense to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term positions for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other objection, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad wish for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our principles, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the reverse; it is negative that elections are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s control and lessen the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after 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 does not in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new Democratic representatives will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and the state’s new Democrats are take office, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer