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What, precisely, is the role of Congress? In the second Trump administration, it is difficult to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a murky right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has claimed even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, the OMB director, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, either; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just ceases operations. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who holds a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ rhetoric may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have long adopted dramatic biased redistricting while large blue states such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State create their district lines via impartial independent commissions, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term feeling, by Democrats, that their political group 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 the GOP an five more seats in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in Virginia are also following the state’s lead in seeking to redistrict.)

The state measure seems likely to be approved, as progressive electorate react with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the proposal on more purely principled pro-democracy grounds: a district that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a healthy democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will provoke the right to alter their respective maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those steps. The GOP, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to redraw boundaries that secure permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a tactical difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a kind of sad desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted population groups; it is not good for politicians to select their voters, instead of the reverse; it is not good that elections are rendered uncontested. That these measures have become necessary in order to slow the authoritarian creep of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is able to inflict is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a representative government. But they are necessary. Only after the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress does not in reality have legislative, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s additional five Democratic house members will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer