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What, exactly, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the presidential office in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the power to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration asserting the ability to abort legislatively approved expenditures and seeking to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, either; virtually all legislation must currently be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, huge perennial must-spend omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these don’t pass – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. That is, large sections of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the federal government has been closed all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens care who holds a controlling share in a body that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have long embraced extreme biased redistricting while big Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, New York and Washington draw their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a long-term sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a countermove to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which installed maps that will give the GOP an five more positions in the state congressional delegation in the upcoming term; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in the Old Dominion are likewise following the state’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems likely to pass, as progressive voters respond with concern and frustration to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and look for ways to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the move could have unintended consequences, with blue states’ attempts to change districts triggering a retaliatory pattern in which red states do even more to draw their maps so as to eliminate any chance of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a way that the outcome of the election is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be truly representative: it implies, inevitably, that the influence of opposing views is suppressed, and that the process of debate, discussion and persuasion that is supposed to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable taking each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that the measure will provoke the right to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be compelled to behave in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been ready to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second critique, in my view, is more significant, expressing not just a tactical disagreement about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition 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 negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have become essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s control and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a sign of how far we have declined from something more like a representative government. But they are required. Only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have lawmaking, military or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic house members will be sent to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic politics and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that power to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 is approved and the state’s new Democrats are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his close advisors to testify. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any Republican would do.

• The columnist is a news outlet writer