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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 vital legislative power, has turned into a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, conducting strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the ability to allocate government money has also shifted to the executive, with the administration claiming the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; virtually all bills must now be packed into spending packages, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when these don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the government simply shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on humming along.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans be concerned who holds a controlling share in a body that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote in the coming weeks, has captured the political imagination of liberals nationwide. In part, it is a delayed response to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed maps that will give the GOP an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely 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 most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ attempts to change districts triggering a revenge cycle in which Republican-controlled states do additional to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological pro-democracy grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the vote is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be truly democratic: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the process of deliberation, argument and persuasion that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in response, fails as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the world that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is not good that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the level of harm he is capable to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If Congress does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and legislative decline, it has made use of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution 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 crucially, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer