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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has turned into a murky 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 himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped 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 executive, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to redirect the money to other uses. It’s not like they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all legislation must now be packed 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, big parts of the government do – and it’s not clear how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the issue of control of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could help California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California proposal is clearly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that recently passed in Texas, which installed maps that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation next year; similar boundary changes are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise following California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as progressive electorate react with fear and frustration to the president’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some critics caution that the action could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy bases: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a functioning political system will be limited only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in retaliation, does not hold up as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, I would observe, has not needed any motivation of revenge to change maps that guarantee permanent seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a kind of sad desire for a different nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become essential in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s power and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, 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 find themselves a part of a body with the power to probe the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to force associates of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer