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What, precisely, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The power to declare war, traditionally viewed as a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear right of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for himself, conducting military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending seems to have largely been stripped from Congress as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel legislatively approved spending and attempting to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a body that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has seized the political imagination of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and the Evergreen State draw their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-term redistricting that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give Republicans an additional five seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are under way in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with fear and anger to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of authority and look for methods to check his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not without debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to change districts setting off a revenge cycle in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to eliminate any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the measure on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the vote is never really in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is muted, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The initial argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to alter their respective districts in response, fails as a logical point: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so without those steps. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The other critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic shift, but a kind of melancholic wish for a different nation than the one that the US has become. It is true that in a more ideal situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, yearn for and hope for – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our principles, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to manipulate targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered uncontested. That these actions have become necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of Trump’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how much we have fallen from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, military or budgetary power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s additional five blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s new representatives are take office, they will find themselves a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer